Eusébio, 71, Legend of Portuguese Soccer, Dies

London — Eusébio, the wonderful soccer player of the 1960s and 1970s, died on Sunday at the age of 71.

Reuters reported the cause of death as a heart attack. He was three weeks from his 72nd birthday.

He was both the first African-born star of soccer and the finest player Portugal fielded in his generation.

In fact, he would surely be worth a place in any all-time world soccer team that anyone could name. With explosive power, extraordinary quickness, innate ability to sense and exploit the moment, came Eusébio’s unique personality. He could cry like a child in moments of defeat; he could lift up a team almost on his own through indomitable spirit; and he would often stand and applaud a goalkeeper who kept out his shots.

As he got older, and his knees that took the kind of pain a boxer endures in the head, he retained that human essence. Meet him at a function, always a soccer related function, and you saw shuffling toward you a man with bowed legs, a pained stride, but that lifelong boyish pleasure in his game.

Cristiano Ronaldo, his replacement as Portugal’s star, posted a picture of the two of them together on Twitter on Sunday. “Always eternal,” he wrote, “Eusébio, rest in peace.”

Beautiful, simple, and maybe the most appropriate thing Ronaldo has written.

In the photo, Eusébio bears a facial resemblance to Desmond Tutu, the South African human rights campaigner. And there is significance in Eusébio, born in Lourenço Marques, Mozambique, becoming so loved, and now so mourned, in the southern African countries former colonial ruler, Portugal.

We know that Eusébio’s childhood was a struggle after his father, a railroad mechanic, died when the boy and four siblings were of school or pre-school age. Kicking around a makeshift ball of old socks or rolled-up paper with bare feet was always Eusébio’s escape, and the source of his sense of self-worth.

By the time that Benfica came for him when he was 15, he knew his destiny. Benfica was not the Lisbon team he admired from afar, but it, rather than a rival club, Sporting, made his mother an offer (a pittance worth a few thousand dollars by today’s standards). It was an offer one of Eusébio’s brothers insisted the club double — and no contest, since Sporting made no financial offer at all, trying to insist instead that the fledgling player was bound to it by virtue of playing for a Mozambican feeder club in his boyhood.

From the start, Eusébio lit up Benfica’s Estádio da Luz, the Stadium of Light.

He lit up this reporter’s youth too when, in 1966, he arrived in England for the World Cup. His contemporaries included Pelé and Bobby Charlton, arguably the finest of Brazilian and English talents. But Pelé was kicked out of that World Cup, Charlton was to be a winner, yet Eusébio left the greatest imprint.

In one match, against the North Korean side that had eliminated Italy, Portugal was on the floor, and three goals down inside 24 minutes. Eusébio dragged the team up. He scored four times, he was felled for a penalty kick, and if ever one player laid to rest the myth that one man cannot make a team, this was the night.

The statistics do not define them. The records may show that Eusébio, known as the Black Panther in his prime, finished with 733 goals in 744 competitive games (though some records contest the numbers, as indeed they do with many goal scorers’ career totals down the decades).

What does it matter? Those of us who saw Eusébio at his best, and particularly those fortunate enough to have known him and listened to him defend the integrity, the lifelong meaning of the sport to his life, see more to him that statistics or honors.

We should not even count him or the handful of his kind, by trying to assess whether they are first, seventh or 10th in the pantheon of all-time players.

Suffice it to say that Eusébio destroyed the nonsense that Africans could not play soccer — or rather could not learn to harness individual flair for the good of the team.

By the way, don’t judge him by today’s monetary values either. He had no regrets, often insisting that he had the best of times. “The generation I played with was the best, ever,” he would tell journalists. “I wouldn’t change it for money. Football today is just commercial. The players are good, but the football of my time was better.”

He talked of the old leather ball weighing a kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, in the heavy, muddied days of yesteryear – and of players like Pelé or Garrincha from Brazil, of George Best and Cruyff, making it obey their touch.

He talked, without jealousy, of a time before Adidas or Nike paying fortunes for footwear contracts. Before the agents, the mercenaries, the celebrity bonanza, or the way that television companies can now determine the time or the day of a big game.

When one of us suggested to Eusébio that his time had its drawbacks, that he wouldn’t be walked on such wounded knees with the miracle of modern medicine now available to top players, he understood. Old players, like aging actors or simply our fathers, thinking they had the best of times.

The Stadium of Light was opened to the public on Sunday for the public to pay their respects. I think I know one person who was there in spirit, the one who wrote: “Always eternal, Eusébio, rest in peace.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D5 of the New York edition with the headline: An All-World Talent and a Rarer Spirit Who Savored His Era. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe